food and a book
Last night Spartacus' dinner included a roast beet, which I had just dug up from our garden a couple hours before I cooked it. For someone with as black a thumb as I have, that is a major accomplishment! It was huge! It looked like a real beet! He seemed to like it well enough, although it was not Spartacus' ideal meal; that would involve us leaving his food scattered all over the floor, preferably for about a day, so that he could crawl around and pick bits of old food up and eat them. In a really ideal world, he'd be naked.
The other thing about beets is that they let you know exactly how fast your child's digestive system is working.
* * *
Over the weekend I finished Anathem, by Neil Stephenson, and must have really liked it, because it was very long, and was about 80% taken up with the discussion of epistemology and ontology, with a side order of mathematics and quantum theory. And it was heavily influenced by Platonism, which I hate. And it was very much about the ideas, not the people in it. And yet I finished it and enjoyed it!
I also found it interesting in light of NS's gender issues -- because it really seems to me that he knows he has a problem with female characters, and is trying really really hard -- but he still gets caught out by his own presuppositions. So for example, he could have made all the avout male, but chose not to -- and his female characters are as well-drawn as anyone else in the story (which isn't saying much, because this is very much a novel of ideas rather than characters) and do many interesting and important things. But none of the advanced theoretical work: they do practical, organizational, mechanical things -- the heavy lifting on the theoretical side is all done by male characters. And there's no plot-related reason for this, I think; it would be just as easy for Fra Paphlagon or Fra Jad to have been written as women, not men. Or even Fra Orolo. But I think that NS really believes that the female mind is just not that interested in (or good at) theory -- that abstraction isn't a female strength. And in a novel in which it is implied that increasing abstraction is the key to approaching the Hylaean Theoric World (the Forms, in the platonic terminology), that's kind of an issue -- and even more so within the (not very articulated) Platonic framework in which theoretical understanding leads to The Good.
I haven't read The Baroque Cycle, but BH tells me that in that, the original female character, Eliza, is clearly brilliant -- but brilliant at finding practical uses for the theories developed by the male characters. And that he does a good job with the historical female scientists. (And really, I feel that in a historical novel, you have to cut an author some slack on what women can and do accomplish -- but in speculative fiction, you don't.) But still, I'm fascinated by how NS is trying, and how he still has this huge gap in what he can imagine.
The other thing about beets is that they let you know exactly how fast your child's digestive system is working.
* * *
Over the weekend I finished Anathem, by Neil Stephenson, and must have really liked it, because it was very long, and was about 80% taken up with the discussion of epistemology and ontology, with a side order of mathematics and quantum theory. And it was heavily influenced by Platonism, which I hate. And it was very much about the ideas, not the people in it. And yet I finished it and enjoyed it!
I also found it interesting in light of NS's gender issues -- because it really seems to me that he knows he has a problem with female characters, and is trying really really hard -- but he still gets caught out by his own presuppositions. So for example, he could have made all the avout male, but chose not to -- and his female characters are as well-drawn as anyone else in the story (which isn't saying much, because this is very much a novel of ideas rather than characters) and do many interesting and important things. But none of the advanced theoretical work: they do practical, organizational, mechanical things -- the heavy lifting on the theoretical side is all done by male characters. And there's no plot-related reason for this, I think; it would be just as easy for Fra Paphlagon or Fra Jad to have been written as women, not men. Or even Fra Orolo. But I think that NS really believes that the female mind is just not that interested in (or good at) theory -- that abstraction isn't a female strength. And in a novel in which it is implied that increasing abstraction is the key to approaching the Hylaean Theoric World (the Forms, in the platonic terminology), that's kind of an issue -- and even more so within the (not very articulated) Platonic framework in which theoretical understanding leads to The Good.
I haven't read The Baroque Cycle, but BH tells me that in that, the original female character, Eliza, is clearly brilliant -- but brilliant at finding practical uses for the theories developed by the male characters. And that he does a good job with the historical female scientists. (And really, I feel that in a historical novel, you have to cut an author some slack on what women can and do accomplish -- but in speculative fiction, you don't.) But still, I'm fascinated by how NS is trying, and how he still has this huge gap in what he can imagine.